Suzanne Simkovich, M.D

Suzanne M. Simkovich MD, MS is a Clinical Scholar at Medstar Health Research Institute and an Assistant Professor of Medicine at Georgetown University. She completed her undergraduate work in finance and her Masters in Professional Accountancy, where she developed the skill sets to understand the fundamentals of cost and financial evaluation.  During medical school and residency in South Carolina, she primarily provided care for underserved populations at the Medical University of South Carolina and in rural communities across the state. This was a welcomed endeavor, as her father was the Director of Public Health. As a result, he impressed upon her at an early age the disparities faced by low income populations and the need to bring low cost but effective interventions to these populations. As she transitioned to pulmonary and critical care fellowship at Johns Hopkins University, she combined her formal education, prior experience, and clinical training to perform cost and productivity evaluations for studies and trials in the United States, Guatemala, India, Peru, Rwanda and Zambia.

Over the past three years Dr. Simkovich has been a junior investigator on the Household Air Pollution Intervention Network (HAPIN) trial. HAPIN is a four country (Guatemala, India, Peru and Rwanda) randomized controlled trial enrolling 3200 pregnant women, who use biomass stoves for cooking and randomizing the pregnant women to receive an LPG stove and continuous fuel or continue to use their biomass stove, then following the pregnant woman, household member and child born during the trial over 18 months and measuring health, environmental, social and economic outcomes. Her MTIS project is to evaluate the cost implications of this intervention. Her career goal is to become an independent investigator in comparative effectiveness research focusing on economic evaluation of interventions to improve the health and livihood of people in domestic and international settings.